27-Year-Old Ankiti Bose, Co- Founder of Zilingo to be the youngest first Indian woman to lead start-up in Asia

27-Year-Old Ankiti Bose, Co- Founder of Zilingo to be the youngest first Indian woman to lead start-up in Asia: A Southeast Asia-focused fashion e-commerce platform, Zilingo has extended near-unicorn status. The Singapore-based enterprise said on Tuesday that it has raised up $226 million from investors comprising Sequoia Capital and Temasek Holdings Pte. As per the sources, the most recent financing prised of Zilingo is at $970 million.

This makes the Co- Founder of Zilingo, Ankiti Bose among the youngest female chief executives who is just 27-year-old to lead a start-up of the size in Asia.

Zilingo is basically a fashion, beauty and lifestyle marketplace whose headquarter is situated in Singapore. It permits small dealers or sellers from Southeast Asia deprived of an online existence to list their articles for sale straight to customers.

Their trades comprise B2C & B2B Marketplace, Private Label as a Service, E-POS & Inventory Management Service and Trend Forecasting as well as Fintech Services. Every single business balances the other, generating compounding facilities and assistances for the platform as in one piece.

Zilingo was founded by 27-year-old Mumbai native Ankiti Bose and Dhruv Kapoor in the year 2015. The story behind their collaboration and start-up is also interesting. The story of creating a fashion platform with a valuation forthcoming $1 billion initiated in December 2014 when Ankiti Bose talked with a neighbour at a house party in the Indian tech capital Bengaluru. She was then an analyst at Sequoia India.

The idea of start-up urged from Bose when she was on holiday in Bangkok and observed that a lot of small and medium sized shops had no online existence.

At the start of the business, Bose was then 23 and Dhruv Kapoor was a 24-year-old software engineer at gaming studio Kiwi Inc. They both speedily understood that they had corresponding skills and related goals to form their own start-up. They quitted their jobs after four months later and both had put in their $30,000 in investments to create Zilingo, an online platform that permits small dealers in Southeast Asia to form scale.

Ankiti Bose on her achievement said, “We were a bunch of twenty-somethings with nothing except this dream and we decided to chase it”.

She further added, “Personally, a lot of men have been very helpful to me in my journey. But of course, if you have more women in venture capital and more female entrepreneurs, then things will get a lot better”.

The business instigated with seed funding from Sequoia India and upstretched an added $8 million in a Series A funding round in the year 2016 at September. In the year 2017, it raised up further $18 million in a Series B round and $54 million in the year 2018, in a Series C round.

By the year 2017 in September, Zilingo started shipping to eight different nations and has retailer centres in Hong Kong, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia and Thailand, which further added 5,000 new dealers in the preceding twelve months.

In the month of February 2019 Zilingo upraised $226m in latest round of funding from Sequoia India, Singapore sovereign fund Temasek and Germany’s Burda as well as Sofina. The Singapore’s Economic Development Board investment division, EDBI, too merged in the round.

Shailendra Singh, the MD of Sequoia Capital India, which seed-funded the company previously in the year 2015 said, “Ankiti was a terrific member of the analyst class at Sequoia India before starting Zilingo-she was razor sharp, hardworking and always switched on. While she always had the raw ingredients, it’s been amazing to witness her transformation into a bold and dynamic founder and a business leader”.